Owning Authority, Disowning Authoritarianism in the Classroom

Drawing on the radical pedagogical thinking of Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004), this presentation explores the tension between pedagogical authority and pedagogical authoritarianism.  Through an exercise drawn from my classroom teaching, we reflect on the ways utopian freedom so often inverts into dystopian unfreedom, and think about the authority of the teacher as necessarily frail, contingent, and messy. The goal (both in the classroom and in the AAR presentation) is to live at the border between a facile anti-authoritarianism and a despairing return to authoritarian order, allowing students—led to this point through the authority of a pedagague—to find the freedom and responsibility of mutual accountability.